The House My Father Gave Me

When I was about 18 years old, there was a woman who I thought was my friend. Her husband has been put in jail for embezzling, and I hung around her house a lot. I practically lived there. I babysat her kids, often for free, and listened to her wail and moan about the pole dancing culture. I can't remember her name now: maybe it was Lynn.

She couldn't afford where they were living anymore. One day while visiting another friend, I came across a vacant house. I told her about it, and she got very excited. She wanted to rent it. So, being the friend I was, I set about to get the owner's information for her. I found it, too, and she got permission to rent this house.

She promised me a room in that house - and this was a good opportunity for me. Where I lived with my parents, there was no hope. There was no bus system, no taxies, and no one willing to help me get to and from work. To move in with Lynn in that house, which was situated right on the edge of our tiny town, meant I could walk to work. Hell, it meant I could work. Maybe buy a car. Maybe finish college. My hopes were very up over her offer.

The house had a reputation for being haunted - this did not scare me at all. I viewed it with her, and she promised me the first room when you entered the house. It was bigger than any room I had ever had in my poor upbringing.

She got the house, and on the day she signed the paperwork she took back her offer to me. However, she said, I could come over and see the house.

"Give me a rock out of your collection," Dad said to me. I got one out of my little keepsake box: it was a small stone, like the kind you buy in a new age shop. He put it in his pocket.

My father and I loaded up in his old truck and we went over there.

She gave me the tour while Dad touched everything. His eyes were bright in that lit way that meant he was up to something. He touched the walls, the doorknobs, the doors. So while Lynn showed me the living room, he slid his hand across the wall paneling.

Lynn walked away for a moment - I can't remember what for - and I turned to the only door in the house that was closed. "That was supposed to be my room," I said to Dad.

"Do you want to see what's inside?" he asked me.

And then, all of it's own, the doorknob turned and the door opened.

I walked to the door of the bedroom and looked inside. Lynn already had a bed in there. The carpet was green. The light from the window was adequate but not fantastic - much like my dashed hopes to earn a better life.

Dad took out the stone and right there in front of Lynn, he put all of the house's energy into that stone. The feelings I felt in that moment were a mixture of gratitude that my father would do this for me, as well as surprise that he even would. He handed me the stone and said, "Here, Jennifer. Here is your house."

Lynn didn't stay in the house for long. I spoke to her only one time after that; it was to hear her complain that the house had lost its energy. And I guess that was the final straw in my relationship with her. During the time I'd known her, she'd used me for a nanny. She'd *smudged me* because a new age friend had told her I was evil. And she just... wasn't right. A few years later another friend said they'd heard from her and she'd asked how I was.

"I don't care," I had responded - which was very uncharacteristic of me back then. I'd have done anything to be your friend in those days. "She owes me an apology."

And that's the last I'd ever heard or saw of Lynn.

I kept that house with me for many years until the stone disappeared one day.  That was my house; the house that my father gave me.

1999 Dream

Going through files tonight, I came across something I'd written May 20, 1999 - stuck in a folder and forgot. All these years later, I open it. At the time I thought, "Just a dream!"

But it's years later, and I've got more research and information under my belt. Just a dream, yes - Just a dream recorded by a young mother who'd never been anywhere in her life. Who'd had militant dreams from childhood and didn't even know why she "shouldn't leave her post" and tended to stand straight and firm. Now I know. But then - a recording of innocence.

Posted here word for word:

I was a soldier, sort of. I don't exactly recall how it happened but there was a friend with me. She and I were standing outside a military building.

"Come on," she said to me. So we walked inside like we belonged, somehow stole a couple of uniforms, and paraded around like soldiers. She wore a general's bars on her shoulders. I had the silver bars of a lieutenant. The uniforms themselves were khacky green.

(Of course these days I know I was wrong about the bars - and the details are too faded for me to figure it out.)

Perhaps it went too far, but somehow we were mistaken not only for the real thing but ended up on a plane to go the war zone. A secret mission or some such. Of course, when it comes to war every maneuver has to remain a secret because you don't want the enemy knowing what you're up to.

I was fascinated, looking down at the ground below. Thousands of men in uniform were across the fields. I remember in particular one was apparently wounded and he dug in the soil, trying to use his gun as leverage to stand. They reminded me of a bucket of soldiers littered across the play yard.

Upon landing, a high ranking soldier, could have been a general of something, approached us. He mistook my friend for someone important. I saluted. She did not. He started talking to her, asking us our business etc. Something about plans. I started to answer, as he was looking at me, but he sort of sniffed in my direction and turned to her. I shut my mouth, for fear of being discovered in this zany adventure.

We went to the mess hall to eat. There were soldiers all around us, but I don't remember what exactly happened here. I kept looking at my lieutenant bars, thinking that I hadn't wanted to portray anything more than a private, and wanted to find someplace secret to take them off.

We met the general again. He was haughty to me, and said something to the effect of, "I have no time for people who masquerade as lieutenants when they're nothing more than privates. That's a hanging offense, private!" My friend was taken for the real thing, even though she was just as much a fraud as I.

I followed my friend because I had wanted to do something good. I was nervous, but not willing to turn in my stolen uniform. I wanted an adventure, to make my mark, and I was there in the war zone to do something heroic. Something good. I can't describe the feeling; The need to do something.

There was a guy. We were in the field, running or something. Can't remember the rest.

I'm breathing, I'm alive: where there's hope there's panic.

When I stumble across the musing of others Flutterbies or, in most cases, people who fake it I see a lot of PTSD reactions. It's fashionable to react as if you have PTSD, as if you are still suffering deep down inside from what may have happened two, ten, or twenty years ago. Like the surge of "multiple personalities" was fashionable for a while, it's fashionable to suffer from shell shock.

These people talk about how the aliens come for them at night, and when they see bright lights they experience unreasonable fear. They talk about sexual trauma; saying things by rote as if memorized from the page of a book. The things they express are very large, movie grade events. Things that make their stories entirely unbelievable to those that were never there.

And, quite often, to me.

Let me tell you about PTSD - a trigger. A big one that was a seed when I was a small child. Understanding of it didn't come to light until my husband came across the information in a book by Springmeier, only a couple of years ago.

Night terrors: we all had them as a child. But imagine being terrified of going to sleep - or waking up - because deep down inside you're more terrified that these nightmares are real. That you're not dreaming at all. And even if you could comprehend past "that was a nightmare" to touch the more tangible thing that surrounds the fugue, no one would believe you. Or if you were believed, no one would talk to you. To let you know you're not alone.

The dreamworld for me was very consistent. When I was a toddler I'd crawl out of my crib to stand at the window and wait, watching by the door. But when I was older, right before I started kindergarten, the dreams took on a very different tone. It was a dark, reoccuring tone that I couldn't escape from no matter how much I screamed for my mommy, or ran, or anything.

The beachs where I grew up were very different from how they are now. They didn't have boardwalks: they had dunes, a lot of dunes. Main beach had foundation blocks and pipes sticking up out of the sand - remnants of a suburban area destroyed by Hurricane Dora - and for most of my young life I honestly thought all beaches had pipes sticking up out of the sand. St. Peter's Point, however, was wild beach. Sand upon sand upon sand waited for you to walk across it before you came to the clear water, where the sun beat down upon you and browned your skin.

I loved that beach more than Main Beach. It was more primal: you could dig there. You could be free there. But at night, for a few weeks, it turned into a nightmare as - I thought - in my dreams I found myself deposited on the sand alone in the dark. There were heads sticking up out of the sand from people who were buried. Sometimes there would be no heads, just hands waiting beneath the sand. And sometimes when I ran, trying to get away from the water and back to the parking lot where I knew it was safer, the hands would reach up out of the ground and pull me under. Once or twice I saw my grandmother, or I thought the woman was my grandmother.

I called the beach the Blood Beach to myself... I was a child in the 70's. Blood Beach the movie, which from the trailers I've seen matches the situation, was released in 1981.

The unreasonable fear of being suffocated, buried alive, or locked in the dark came out again when I was locked in the bathroom with my mother's sister's stepdaughter in the dark. The scream of terror came out of me without any control. The horrible woman's response at my fear - no comfort, no care, just anger at the inconvenience of dealing with a loud child - didn't help.

So it goes.. so that now I'm 40. I can't watch anything on television that deals with the subject. If I do I end up awake at almost midnight, like right now, trying to deal with the pain. Trying to come to terms with the fact that the information my husband found was about the training of young Flutterbies. Apparently they'd be buried alive. Knowing that isn't the comfort; understanding this might be the source doesn't help because in your head is a lack of information. There's a black hole where the offending incident or incidents might be, and so long as you can't remember them you can never come to terms with what has happened. If it happened at all.

At the hint of the situation - even knowing the main character will be alright - my heart pounds as I stare at the television, mewling like a frightened animal. Sometimes all you can do is revert to being that small child again, bounce off the couch, and run to the wall with your back to it as you watch the entire room in your terror. In your mind races all sorts of scenarios: you're in a car, drowning in a river. You're buried in a coffin. Your lungs are filling with water from being sick and nobody will do anything to stop it.

Your mind is racing with escape scenarios, too. Maybe you can kick the glass out of the car door and swim to the surface - but oh gods. Your children. How will you save your children? So that for all your intelligence, nothing can save you.

That, my friends, is PTSD and being a Flutterby - probably of the last generation to be taught in the old-fashioned manner. It's not sex: it's not thinking about some abusive figure on purpose so you can rant in your journal and get a little attention. It's not bright lights: telling people some Fourth Contact scenario again and again. It's trying to hide from the fear, the darkness, the terror. Trying to avoid situations that trigger the feelings. Of not talking about it. Of long nights being unable to sleep no matter how tired you are and finally coming to your computer to blog about it. Of knowing that your shell shock isn't the kind anybody at the VA will ever care enough about.

I have PTSD. I have many triggers. Some, best I can tell being as I have to treat myself and handle things by myself, stem from the waking world and everyday mundane things. But then there are others that set my mind into motion, and there's no explanation for them at all.